Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series

MCT Fall 2023 Poster

Please join us for the 2023-24 this year for the MCT series on contemporary theory and its engagements. Lectures will be held in Tuesdays from 5:15 to 6:45pm in Greg 213, a well-ventilated venue that holds almost 150 people, thus accommodating those who prefer to avoid crowded spaces. Lectures will not be streamed for off-site viewers, although some may be taped (contingent on permission from the speaker). Wearing face masks is encouraged. The lectures are coordinated with graduate seminars on critical theory in a number of departments, but are also open to other faculty or graduate students who may wish to attend.

For participants not enrolled in one of the affiliated courses, see the Box folder of corresponding readings for each lecture. To see the poster in a larger format, click here. For more information, including the password to access the readings, please email Unit-for-Criticism@illinois.edu.

 

Modern Critical Theory Reading List 2023

 

9/5 Liat Ben-Moshe “Decarcerating Disability: Prison Abolition and Deinstitutionalization” (Criminology, Law and Justice, UIC)

Greg Hall 213

Required Readings

  • Ben-Moshe, Liat. Why prisons are not the new asylums. Punishment and Society 19 (3), pp. 272 - 289, 2017 
  • Ben-Moshe, Liat. Dis-Epistemologies of Abolition. Critical Criminology, 26(3), 341-355, 2018
  • Ben-Moshe, Liat. "Introduction: Intersecting Disability, Imprisonment, and Deinstitutionalization," Decarcerating disability: Deinstitutionalization and prison abolition. U of Minnesota Press, 2020.

 

 

9/12 Craig Koslofsky “Skin and Epidermalization” (History, UIUC)

Greg Hall 213

Required Readings

  • Broeck, Sabine. "Never Shall We Be Slaves: Locke's Treatises, Slavery, and Early European Modernity." In Blackening Europe: The African American Presence. Edited by Heike Raphael-Hernandez. London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 235-247.
  • Holt, Thomas C. "Marking: Race, Race-Making, and the Writing of History." The American Historical Review 100, 1 (1995): 1-20.
  • Karayiannides, Efthimios. "‘Aberrations of affect,’ the Critique of Ontology and the Specificity of the Colonial Relation in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks." Subjectivity 13 (2020): 337-354.
  • Mazzolini, Renato. "Skin Color and the Origin of Physical Anthropology (1640-1850)." In Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences. Edited by Susanne Lettow. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015, pp. 131-161.

Supplemental Readings

  • Ahmed, Sarah. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8, 2 (2007): 149–168.
  • Gordon, Lewis R. What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to his Life and Thought. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.
  • Hall, Stuart. “The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks? In The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Edited by Alan Read. Seattle: Bay Press, 1996, pp. 13-37.
  • Song, Seunghyun. “Bridging Epidermalization of Black Inferiority and the Racial Epidermal Schema: Internalizing Oppression to the Level of Possibilities.” DiGeSt. Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 4, 1 (2017): 49–61.
  • Stephens, Michelle. "What Is this Black in Black Diaspora?" Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 13, 2 (2009): 26-38.
  • Wilderson, Frank B. “Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption.” Humanities Futures. Franklin Humanities Institute: Duke University, 2015. https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/afro-pessimism-end-redemption/.
  • Wynter, Sylvia. "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, its Overrepresentation—An Argument." CR: The New Centennial Review 3, 3 (2003): 257-337.

 

 

9/19 Mónica Jiménez “Toward a Legal Genealogy of Racial Exclusion: Law and the Making of Puerto Rico” (History, UT Austin)

Greg Hall 213

Required Readings

 

 

9/26 Helmut Puff “Architectures of Waiting: The Time of the Antechamber” (History, Michigan)

Greg Hall 213

Required Readings

  • Bourdieu, Pierre.  “Social Being, Time and the Sense of Existence,”Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, 207-45. 
  • Burke, Peter. “Performing History: The Importance of Occasions,” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 9(2005): 35-52.
  • Kracauer, Siegfried. “Those Who Wait,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, 129-40, 362-63. 
  • Puff, Helmut, and Bernardo Zacka. “Architectures of Waiting: Helmut Puff and Bernardo Zacka in Conversation,” Contemporary Political Theory 21 (2022): 1-18.  

 

 

10/3 Shirl Yang “A Labor Theory of Suspense” (English, Wash U)

Greg Hall 213

Required Readings

  • Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic (excerpt)
  • Hong, Renyi. Passionate Work: Endurance After the Good Life (Chapter 1: "From Happiness to Passion")
  • McClanahan, Annie. "The Spirit of Capital in an Age of Deindustrialization"
  • Liu, Andy. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chapter 1: "The Idea of Knowledge Work") 

 

 

10/10 Shelley Weinberg "Descartes and Locke on the Certainty of Knowledge" (Philosophy, UIUC)

Greg Hall 213

Required Readings

  • René Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Rules 2, 3, 7, 11.
  • René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations I, II, (parts of Meditation III)
  • John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book 2, Ch. 1, Secs. 1-8; Book 4, Ch. 1, Secs. 1-3; Bk 4, Ch 2, Secs 1-7; Bk 4, Ch 3, Secs 1-5; Bk 4, Ch 11, Secs. 1-8.
  • William Alston (1986). "Epistemic Circularity," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47:1, 1-30.
  • Alan Gewirth (1941). "The Cartesian Circle" The Philosophical Review 50:4, 368-395.
  • Keith DeRose (1992). "Descartes, Epistemic Principles, Epistemic Circularity, and Scientia," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 73: 3, 220-238.

 

 

10/17 Tamara Chaplin “Queering French History” (History, UIUC)

Greg Hall 213

Required Readings

  • Doan, Laura. Chapter 1 “An Uncommon Project, The Discipline Problem Reconsidered,” and Chapter 2, “Genealogy Inside and Out,” in Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp.27-57 and pp.58-93.=
  • Duggan, Lisa, “The Discipline Problem: Queer Theory meets Lesbian and Gay History,” GLQ,  Vol. 2, (1995), pp. 179-191.
  • Faderman, Lillian, “Who Hid Lesbian History?” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3, Lesbian History (Autumn, 1979), pp.74-76.
  • Vicinus, Martha. “The History of Lesbian History,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Fall 2012), pp. 566-596.

 

Supplemental Readings

  • Abelove, Henry.  “The Queering of Lesbian/Gay History,” Radical History Review 62 (Spring 1995): 45-57.
  • Bennett, Judith M. “‘Lesbian-Like’ and the Social History of Lesbianisms,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 9, No. ½ (January-April, 2000), pp.1-24.
  • Garber, Linda. “Where in the World Are the Lesbians,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol 14. Nos. 12 January 2005/ April 2005 pp. 28-50.

 

 

10/24 Ned O'Gorman "Arendt and the Question of Technology" (Sociology, UIUC)

Greg Hall 213

Required Readings

  • Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition (excerpt). 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. pp. 136-92.
  • Arendt, Hannah. "Introduction: On War and Revolution" in On Revolution. New York: Penguin Books, 1963. pp. 11-20.
  • Dewey, John. "Renascent Liberalism" (excerpt) in Liberalism and Social Action. New York: GP Putnam's Sons, 1935. pp. 56-83.
  • Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Garland Publishing, 1977. pp. 3-35.
  • Marcuse, Herbert. "Introduction to the first edition: The paralysis of criticism: society without opposition" in One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge Classics, 2002. pp. xxxix-xlviii.

Supplemental Readings

 

10/31 Penelope Deutscher “Revocability, Exception, Disqualifying Qualification: Grammars of Power After Foucault and Roe” (Philosophy, Northwestern)

Greg Hall 213

Required Readings

  • Hartman, Saidiya. “The Burdened Individuality of Freedom” in Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. 115-124. WW Norton & Company, 2022.
  • Deutscher, Penelope. "Qualifying Disqualification and Its Inversions: Power after Foucault and the Distributions of Incapacity." Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 43, no. 1 (2022): 3-30.
  • Foucault, Michel. "11 January 1978" in Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78, 1-23. Springer, 2007.
  • Goodwin, Michele. "The Pregnancy Penalty: When the State Gets It Wrong." In Policing the womb: Invisible women and the criminalization of motherhood. 129-163. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

 

 

11/7 Ramón Soto-Crespo “Environmental Humanities and the Caribbean” (English, UIUC)

Greg Hall 213

Required Readings

  • Coming Soon!

 

 

11/14 Bob Markley “Problems in Theorizing the Origins of Capitalism” (English, UIUC)

Greg Hall 213

Required Readings

  • Coming Soon

 

 

11/28 AbdouMaliq Simone “Non-arrival: The Spiritual Dispositions of the Urban Surrounds” (Urban Institute, University of Sheffield)

ZOOM

Required Readings

  • Coming Soon!